Saturday, July 19, 2014

The use and need of EMR
software check over here are reaching a new height of demand with time. Using software for
recording and accessing all patient data has made medical data recording
technology much swifter and faster. However, though there has been lot of
advancement and worldwide usage of the software, it is still facing some
pitfalls. While working on such software, a medical practitioner has to have
face real time issues. A major one among many such fall backs is the dominance
of drop down menus to segregate various diseases, symptoms, categories etc.
Though meant to simplify and centralize the recording method, the same drop
down menu many a times fail to meet the real time issues and need.

Why Drop Down Menu in
EMR software?

Categorizes all the syndromes, symptoms, diseases in an organized way

Makes work easier for a practitioner who just needs to select a appropriate category for his patient

Saves time by escaping free typing with pre-listed categorical divisions

It is easy to handle

Facilitates the data entry procedure to a great extent

However at the same time this drop down menu can also be
problematic. Since a practitioner needs to select a suitable and appropriate
symptom of his patient from the hundreds of listed symptoms, it might not
always fulfill the requirement. This is when the problem arises leading to
further complications.

Sort of issues with
drop down menus

Like for example if a patient complains about high pressure
in his first visit, the doctor selects high pressure from the drop down list of
EMR software and records the treatment
records of the patient and more information on drop-down menus of so-called best practices at nytimes.com. At the next visit the patient might not even have a
complaint about high pressure; he might have complaint of breathlessness.
However the patient ultimately meets a cardiac attack and the cardiologist is
sued for not being able to treat him properly.

A common error that might occur with drop down menu is that
while selecting the preferable category from a huge list of hundreds of
category a practitioner may accidentally select a medication below or above the
exact one. This kind of accidental click might lead to potential disasters
later on. Moreover, accidental or mistaken information once fed to EHR or EMR softwaresustains and circulates
leading to potential errors in future.

How can one prevent
such errors?·One must attempt to select the most appropriate
category while selecting from the drop down list·Practitioners can invest more attention on free
typing and keeping detailed note of patients symptoms and condition from second
visit onwards·Practitioners should communicate with the
service providers immediately after finding out any pit fall in the EMR
software

Though there might be some pitfalls with drop down lists,
one cannot omit the advantages it offers at the same time. Therefore these kinds
of pitfalls can be tackled with particular development on the issues and by
taking cautious steps to prevent any potential error while handling the
software by healthcare workers.